Graphs from WPZOOM.com showing WordPress market share in 2026
Blogging 101
“Weblogs” or blogs are the original diy progenitors of micro-blogging sites like Twitter and Bluesky, and they are still a valuable means of long-form expression, engagement and project sharing.
In the DH world, the HASTAC community is a good example of a very large and long-standing network whose main connective activity continues to be its collaborative blog (despite its recent move to Humanities Commons).
WordPress started as a blogging platform, but has grown to becoming the most widespread platform for building websites on the internet, hosting over 40% of all websites globally for the past three years.
To begin to join this world, you will all be reading, writing, and sharing what we do this term on this blog and your own, which we’ll set up next week. This is not just about trying out the digital humanities. It is also about practicing skills of writing for the public and controlling your digital identity that will serve you well beyond your college career no matter what you choose to do. Having control over your internet presence is crucial in this day and age, and building your own website is one of the best ways to craft and maintain a public, online identity.
In Class Exercises
Your first posts this week will be on your thoughts on the readings about the field of DH and on your process and experience with 3D modeling.
Posting to the Blog
For starters, you’ll register for this class site so you can comment on assignments, post to the blog and get familiar with the WordPress interface, if you aren’t already.
Follow these instructions to register for our course site and post your first comment.
Good? Once you’ve done all that…
Reflective Blog Post (due Friday)
Now that you’ve read more about Digital Humanities and tried your hand at making something, I want to hear your reflections on how you see your past experiences and current interests intersecting with this field.
Choose a quotation that resonated with you from one of the readings assigned for today and write a reflective blog post that answers the following questions:
- Why did this particular passage grab your attention?
- What elements of your past experiences, current interests, or future plans did it kindle?
- Under the large umbrella of Digital (Arts &) Humanities, which areas of inquiry, methods or techniques are you most eager to pursue this term and why?
Start your blog post with a Quote block and citation as in the example below
Digital Humanities is born of the encounter between traditional humanities and computational methods.
Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 3.
As you write, remember that blog writing is a different beast that lies somewhere between formal academic writing and casual social media or email style. Try for a tone that is scholarly and informed but neither too stiff nor too sloppy. It can be a tough balance to strike, but think of your intended audience and try to find a voice that works for you.
- Categorize your post with Blog and the appropriate Week (e.g. Week 1)
- Add any free Tags that you think relevant
- Publish!
Submit the link to Moodle as
- Blog Week 1
We barely scratched the surface of what you can do with this platform in class, but we will get deeper into the weeds next week as you set up your own WordPress instance with complete administrative control.
Resources
Carleton College’s own web services group has a lot of good resources for how to write for the web effectively.
Lab Assignment 1 continued (due Sunday):
3D Modeling Post Instructions
Continue to work on your 3D model if needed, and once you’re done, share the results and your reflections on the process as your first Lab Assignment.
- Open the Google Drive folder where you stored the exported images of your object model (instructions are here if you’ve forgotten).
- Log in to this Hacking the Humanities class blog, if not already
- Make a new post sharing several 2D images of your house that you exported from Fusion 360
- Make sure to caption the images appropriately and include Alt Text for accessibility
- In the accompanying text tell us about your process.
- How easy/hard was it?,
- What elements particularly bogged you down?,
- What compromises did you have to make?
- Most importantly: what humanistic uses can you envision for 3D modeling in the areas of research or teaching? Fusion is just one tool that can be used to do this type of work — reflect beyond the specifics of this tool, to the area of inquiry more broadly. How can 3D modeling be useful for humanities scholarship and public engagement?
- Make sure to also share a tip for other novice Fusion 360 users about the tool that you found most useful, or a technique that you wish you had figured out sooner. Part of the digital maker philosophy is sharing the knowledge you gained, so make sure to pass it on.
- Finally, embed an interactive viewer of the Fusion 360 model in your post. This will allow others to interact with your model and is good practice for web-based DH visualization tools.
- Log into Autodesk and copy the embed code following their embed instructions here.
- Add a Custom HTML Block to your wordpress post and paste the embed code into it. It should look something like this.
<iframe src="[URL]" width="800" height="600" allowfullscreen="true" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" frameborder="0"></iframe>
- Categorize your post with Lab Assignment and the appropriate Week (i.e. Week 1)
- Add any free Tags that you think relevant
- Publish!
Congratulations! You have posted your first lab assignment post and can now share your interests and knowledge with the world.
Finally, read and comment on two of your classmates’ 3D modeling posts and
submit links to all three to Moodle as
- Lab Assignment Week 1,
- Comment 1 Week 1, and
- Comment 2 Week 1